Chipley football focused on toughness, physicality under first-year head coach

CHIPLEY  – The Chipley football team is under new leadership this year in head coach Marcus Buchanan and heÂ’s focusing on one thing for the Tigers this season: toughness. 

“I donÂ’t want to hear about no scratch or bump or bruise, if a boneÂ’s not sticking out weÂ’re playing,” Buchanan said. 

The players have adopted this mindset now just two weeks into fall practice.

“We like it cause you see on the news, everyone says it the world is getting softer every day, football out here with Coach Buchanan is somewhere where we can get away from that, go back to the old school way of doing things and we really enjoy that,” Chipley H-back and linebacker Will Taylor said. 

Coach Buchanan hopes that toughness and physicality will show up on the field this season, especially when it comes to their offense. 

“To be successful in high school football, you have to be physical in the run game, but at the same time we want to create big explosive plays in the passing game,” Buchanan said. 

We’ve got a good quarterback, we’ve got three or four very good receivers that can take a roof off a defense in a hurry. If we force you to play three four high all the time it opens up the power run game,” he added.

The team really does have some weapons on the field, like quarterback Neal Adams, whoÂ’s also a big baseball player and has a serious arm; three-star cornerback Alsethony McGee, whoÂ’s playing multiple positions on the field this year and Daquayvious Sorey whoÂ’s the best receiver in the country for his class. 

“We have a lot of talent, a lot of leadership, I think weÂ’ll make it because of our leadership, we all care for each other,” Sorey said. 

While the Tigers have a lot of talent and leadership, they only have three seniors and those three have never experienced a winning-season or even a playoff victory, so thatÂ’s what motivating them in 2021. 

“Our coach has been kind of preaching to us this is our revenge tour this year. We want to go back, weÂ’ve been on the short end of the stick and we want to turn that around this year and run it up on some teams like they did to us and pay Â’em back so,” Taylor said. 

Chipley kicks off their regular season against Graceville at home on August 27.